I’m a personal branding pioneer and consultant, founder of Reach Personal Branding, and bestselling author of the definitive books on executive branding: Ditch.Dare. Do! and Career Distinction. I'm passionate about how personal branding can inspire career-minded professionals to become indispensable, influential and incredibly happy at work—and I teach my clients (major global brands and 20% of the Fortune 100) to increase their success by infusing personal branding into their cultures. BBC TV, the Discovery Channel, NPR, Fox News, Time, Entrepreneur, GQ, The New York Times and dozens of other national and global publications have featured me as a personal branding expert, and my leadership in the field has inspired hundreds of coaches in 41 countries to become Certified Reach Personal BrandingStrategists. Here's a fun fact: I have the distinct privilege of having delivered more personal branding keynotes to more people, in more countries, than anyone on earth.

Three Steps For Transforming Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

Every well-managed company strives to have a strong brand. The main motivator? Sales volume, often paired with premium pricing. For most companies, the stronger the brand, the higher the premium they can charge for their products and services. Think about why so many people pay $4 for a StarbucksStarbucks coffee when the coffee from the cafe down the street only costs $1.50. With a strong brand, a company can also increase its product lines with ease, thrive during economic downturns, gain leverage in partnerships, and attract the best talent. The benefits of a strong brand are tremendous. The best leaders realize that, despite conventional wisdom, strong brands aren’t built by the marketing department alone; every employee in every department has a role to play.

Engaged Employees Build Strong Brands

Many companies focus all their branding efforts on marketing activities such as advertising campaigns and packaging, yet one of the most powerful brand assets your company has is your people. Regardless of which industry you’re in, building a strong brand requires that all employees feel connected to the corporate brand and understand their role in turning brand aspirations into reality. If you’re not inspiring your talent to be brand ambassadors, you’re missing out. According to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer “Employees rank higher in public trust than a firm’s PR department, CEO, or Founder. 41% of us believe that employees are the most credible source of information regarding their business.” When a customer interacts with one of your frontline employees, or with the work produced by your behind-the-scenes employees, everything your PR and marketing departments have done will be put to the test.

To build a strong corporate brand, you need brand ambassadors – employees who are thoroughly engaged, connected and committed. Scarlett Surveys International defines Employee Engagement as “a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organization that profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work.”

Consider these facts about employee engagement:

A paper published by the Performance Improvement Council referenced “studies by Gallup that confirm that engaged employees are more productive, create better customer experiences, and are more likely to remain with their employers. As a result, employers win because they get a more stable and motivated workforce and can, consequently, spend more time strengthening their brand.”

In a whitepaper for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Robert J. Vance, Ph.D., states, “The greater an employee’s engagement, the more likely he or she is to ‘go the extra mile’ and deliver excellent on-the-job performance. In addition, engaged employees may be more likely to commit to staying with their current organization. Software giant Intuit, for example, found that highly engaged employees are 1.3 times more likely to be high performers than less engaged employees. They are also 5 times less likely to voluntarily leave the company.”

Another Gallup study revealed that “companies with high employee engagement levels have 3.9 times the earnings per share when compared to those in the same industry with lower engagement levels.”

Engagement is critical, and it comes with many benefits. So how do you build employee engagement? In their groundbreaking report “Employee Engagement,” Dilys Robinson and Sue Hayday suggest that employees are motivated by intrinsic factors like personal growth, working for a common purpose, and being part of a larger process, rather than simply focusing on extrinsic factors such as pay and benefits.

That’s good news for your bottom line, but it takes some know-how to integrate those intrinsic factors into employee development. To transform employees into brand ambassadors, follow these three steps:

1. Promote Self Discovery – Personal Branding

According to a report by Daniel Cable, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats published in Administrative Science Quarterly, “Cornell University research shows that to maximize employee satisfaction, new employee socialization should focus on personal, not corporate, identity. … When your employees can be their ‘authentic best selves’ in the workplace productivity and retention increase.” In this research, new hires who were asked questions such as, “What is unique about you that leads to your happiest times and best performance at work?” had lower turnover rates, performed tasks more effectively, and showed higher overall engagement. This type of question shows interest in the employee and his or her personal growth potential. It also shows new hires that the organization cares about their well-being, which leads to engagement and employee buy-in of all that the brand represents. Those who are asked questions like, “What did you hear about [Our Company] that makes you proud to be part of this organization?” will give the impression that the organization is only focused on the bottom line. Telling new hires that they should feel lucky to be working for you can backfire. It communicates arrogance, which repels. Your goal is to attract so that your new brand ambassadors will feel authentically drawn to your brand.

Helping your employees unearth their greatest strengths and integrate them into everything they do is essential to your success and the success of your team.

2. Make Brand Awareness a Priority: Corporate Branding 101

Gallup asked more than 3,000 randomly selected workers to assess their agreement with the statement “I know what my company stands for and what makes our brand different from our competitors.” Shockingly, only 41% of employees strongly agreed with this statement. This statistic indicates that more than half of those surveyed were not fully aware of their company’s brand positioning and differentiation. How can your team deliver on the corporate brand promise if they aren’t clear about what it is? As a leader, you must educate your team on the brand and live the brand so they can learn from your example.

3. Connect the Personal and the Corporate

Here’s one of the most common (and most damaging) branding misconceptions I encounter: the personal brand and the corporate brand compete (rather than cooperate). Nothing could be further from the truth. The most successful companies help employees understand their personal brands, capitalizing on the integration of these individual traits with the broader corporate objectives. It’s called applied personal branding, and it’s a powerfully simple strategy. It’s based on the principle of personal plus corporate, not personal vs. corporate. When employees are clear about who they are and what makes them exceptional (a process that you can easily implement by promoting self discovery), and they have been educated with an understanding of the corporate brand objectives, they can apply their unique skills and expertise to activate the corporate goals. Think consistency, not conformity, and you’re following the lucrative path of Southwest Airlines and Apple’s Genius Bar. A consistent brand does not emerge from conformist employees. Each individual needs to determine how he or she can deliver on the corporate brand promise in a way that’s authentic, leveraging the corporate identity with what ignites them and makes them exceptional.

Even if you’re not a leader in your company but are passionate about engagement and building brand ambassadors, you have a role to play. Take on the branding task for your team. Let your manager know you want to lead a branding initiative for the group. This highly visible role gives you the opportunity to move outside the normal hierarchy, grow your brand with your team, and take on a role that is critical to the success of your company.

A strong brand requires employee engagement, which is driven by integrating the personal brands of your people. They’re the greatest existing resource within any organization.

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